A few years now, I’ve been posting my new year’s resolutions on my livejournal, and since that’s all but dead at this point, ditched for my website blog, I’ll post them here.

First, last year’s results:

– I’m through with surviving. This year I want to live. – I’m calling this a success.

– Remain happily married another year (this one stays the same.) – Still married. Still happy. Still same man, even.

– Stop being so hard on myself for not spending more time sewing, not playing my guitar, not writing enough short fiction, or not doing anything that doesn’t matter that much to me. I love writing, and novels is what I’m good at. – I didn’t write anything, or draw anything, sew anything, or play my guitar at all this last year, and screw it, I got a ton of writing done, and I’m quite proud of my accomplishments.

– Keep a tidier house – it can always get better. – marginal improvement on last year.

– Get out of debt. – fail.

– Eat better/sleep more. (shouldn’t be hard with the new job.) – Success – even more so than I expected, since the DH and I started a new nutrition plan, and he’s lost 30 lbs, and I’ve lost 10.  I wasn’t quite overweight, but another three or four lbs from where I started before the diet, and I would technically have been. The DH is nearly down to a healthy weight, and the lifestyle changes that have got us there are sustainable.

– Get The Eyelet Dove to at least second draft. – I’m going to give myself this one, even through it’s not really at second draft. I’m most of the way through Holly Lisle’s “How To Revise Your Novel” course, and it’s been an awesome help with streamlining a tough revision. Promising a review of the course once I’m done. But the reason I’m giving myself this one, is because normally I would do a third and a fourth draft most likely, and with this course, it should be at final draft at the end, and the amount of work I’ve put in at this point is about what I had, last January, expected to put into a second draft.

– Finish NaNoWriMo again, for a third time. – Success.

– Finish a first draft of my Handless Maiden story idea. – I don’t think I can wait for that to be my 2011 nano novel, so theoretically I should have 2 first drafts by the end of the year, and lots of editing to do in 2012. – Almost. I’m about 3/4 through.

– In the event that I get “the call”, drop all of the previous three, and do whatever Sheila Gilbert wants me to. – No word on my submission to Sheila Gilbert, but I did get a bite from an agent that was super exciting, even though it was a no at the end. And now, after taking this course, I’m pretty sure I can make the novel I’d submitted better, so I’m not going to fuss about it until I have revised it one more time.

So – last year I was kind of over-ambitious with my writing goals. I know that I’m not someone who has issues with starting a million things and never finishing anything, so I wasn’t worried about starting a bunch of new projects. I got a lot done, just didn’t quite finish some of them. In any case, 2012 is going to be a year for finishing things, so it’s going to be mostly writing goals:

– Read more female authors. The male authors tend to be more hyped up and I end up reading them first, before the female authors on my TBR list. I have plenty of books to get me through the year if I resolve to read only female authors until 2013.

– Get The Eyelet Dove to final draft.

– Write a query letter and Synopsis for The Eyelet Dove, and submit it to agents.

– Finish the first draft of Handless.

– Win NaNoWriMo for a fourth time running.

– Come up with a better ending for, and finish revising “Codliver Oil”.

With that, I should have a short story and a novel to start submitting, and that will be exciting.  I’m posting a teaser for The Eyelet Dove shortly in the new year – I’m quite happy with my opening chapter now, so keep your eye out for it.